How the Texas Testing Bubble Popped: Part 2

‘The Heart of the Vampire’

Fiery words from an unexpected source give anti-testing movement a charge while superintendents outline a new vision

In January 2012, a coalition was building in Texas that would eventually end 34 unbroken years of increased reliance on high-stakes testing to measure the effectiveness of Texas schools.

An otherwise mundane legislative committee meeting had brought together the grass-roots group that would be known as Texans Advocating for Meaningful Student Assessment.

But the embryonic TAMSA wasn’t the only new element in the testing debate. Only three days after that hearing, the head of the Texas Education Agency spoke out against testing in a way that echoed far beyond the state’s borders.

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Jeff Turner

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Superintendent of Coppell ISD, former president of Texas Association of School Administrators. Fiery and inspiring speaker who helped bring superintendents across the state into the testing battle.

“He dropped the bomb,” recalled Jeff Turner, superintendent for Coppell ISD. “He sucked the air out of the room.”

Robert Scott had been the state’s education commissioner since 2007. By then, he’d been working on education issues in Austin and Washington for almost 20 years.

Scott seems younger than his 44 years. His professional persona was always on script and on message.

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Robert Scott

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Former Texas Education Commissioner. Long identified as a supporter of the state testing and accountability system, his public repudiation of what it had become inspired rebels in Texas and nationally.

To the public, he was a loyal soldier of Gov. Rick Perry and a strong supporter of the state’s testing program. To this day, he says he believes in the value of standardized tests, properly used.

Behind closed doors and with some education officials, Scott had expressed his concerns. But he’d never gone public with them.

So at the Jan. 26 meeting of the Texas State Board of Education, when board member George Clayton tossed out a routine query about the amount of time spent in test preparation, Scott’s reply was shocking.

He said that extensive test prep was a “perversion” of the process. And he went further.

“What we’ve done in the past decade, is we’ve doubled down on the test every couple of years, and used it for more and more things, to make it the end-all, be-all,” he said. “You’ve reached a point now of having this one thing that the entire system is dependent upon. It is the heart of the vampire, so to speak.”

Five days later, he was a featured speaker at the annual Midwinter Conference, a meeting that brings together superintendents and other key staffers from school districts across Texas.

Scott walked to the lectern carrying nothing but a printout of a column by a hospice chaplain posted online days before, with a few notes scribbled in the margins.

He went on for more than 20 extemporaneous, emotional minutes, trying out uncertain metaphors that left no question where his heart was.

“I think we have taken these tools intended to improve teaching and learning, and we have forgotten the true meaning of them. It’s as if we were in our kitchen, and we’ve mistaken the spatula we use to flip the burgers for the true meaning of the people who are inside our homes,” he said.

He spoke more plainly about testing and its effects:

“I believe that testing is good for some things. But the system we have created has become a perversion of its original intent.”

And he ended with this:

“What that means in the end is when we are ready to meet our maker, when we are in that bed, and that chaplain, that hospice nurse, that pastor, listens to you talk about your mother and your father and your son and your daughter, and they ask you, ‘Well, why did you spend so much time climbing,’ you can say because the children were there. And that will be a life worth living.”

He got a standing ovation.

Where did this speech come from? Partly it was Scott’s first-hand knowledge of the impact of testing: He has two children who came up through Texas public schools. And partly it was his awareness of his role in an imperfect and opaque process, he said recently.

Subjectivity was baked deeply into the system, from the curriculum decisions forward. But few outside the system knew about that.

Test scores weren’t simply based on how many questions a student got right. The numbers are adjusted based on how hard designers think the test is — an invisible curve. And the passing score — the cut score — is set by the commissioner.

Scott always set the cut scores a bit higher than the year before, but not so high that it would fail too many kids and cause too many parents to lose confidence in their schools.

“I know there are flaws in this process,” he said recently. “I know I’m setting the cut score. And I know that I’m fallible. How the hell can I support this?”

Less than four months after that speech, Scott told Perry he was stepping down. He did it on May 1, his birthday. “It was a present to myself,” Scott said recently.

Dineen Majcher, one of the Austin moms who founded TAMSA, wasn’t there for the speech, but she heard about it pretty quickly. She’s watched a recording of it several times.

“I cry every time,” she said.

The day after the speech, she and another TAMSA board member met with representatives of the TEA and the Texas attorney general’s office and explained that they were prepared to file suit to block the “15 percent rule.” This was the requirement that scores on the state’s end-of-course exams must represent 15 percent of the final grade in the course.

Two weeks later, the chairs of the two key legislative committees on education, Sen. Florence Shapiro, R-Plano, and Rep. Rob Eissler, R-The Woodlands, sent letters to Scott saying that he had the authority to put the rule on hold for a year. And on Feb. 17, Scott did just that.

But that concession was too late to derail TAMSA.

“We were convinced that even if we got the waiver, the legislation would have to change,” Majcher said.

Robert Scott, former education commissioner, sparked a national revolt in 2012 when he called high-stakes testing a “perversion of the system.” (Michael Ainsworth, The Dallas Morning News)

Turning point

For Majcher’s side of the accountability debate, Scott’s speech was something like witnessing Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. For the other side, it was a Benedict Arnold moment.

Test supporters had been working to create this exact system for decades. STAAR was the capstone, a comprehensive accountability matrix that included testing and consequences that supporters said would accelerate learning in Texas schools.

By mid-2012, many of the early school reform pioneers had left the battle or lost the faith.

Even the legislative chairs who had put STAAR together were leaving. Shapiro had announced in 2011 that she would not run for re-election. And in May 2012, House public education chairman Eissler lost a primary battle.

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Sandy Kress

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Austin lawyer and lobbyist for Pearson and other education-related clients, former president of Dallas ISD school board. Support for high-stakes testing predates his lobbying work.

But a few people were still defending the STAAR program. A notable example: Sandy Kress, who had spent more than 20 years helping to construct the system.

In the 1980s, the Dallas lawyer chaired the Dallas County Democratic Party. In 1989, searching for a cause to work on, Kress landed on education. Kress eventually became president of the Dallas school board and then a key schools adviser first to Gov. George W. Bush, then President Bush, and then on to Gov. Rick Perry.

In 1990, the Dallas school board asked him to chair a “Commission for Educational Excellence.” A year later, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock appointed Kress to the “Texas Educational Economic Policy Committee” where he chaired a subcommittee that focused on accountability.

Kress and others he worked with borrowed much of their philosophy from business leaders.

A “three-legged stool” of accountability, they decided, would drive achievement in education the same way similar systems pushed corporate productivity: Set clear goals using a well-defined curriculum. Annually measure student performance. And make sure the results have consequences.

As the 1991 state report put it: “Consequences are the critical link between installing an accountability system for education and the actual improvement of schools.”

Kress remains an unswerving believer that the vital outcomes of education can be gauged about as effectively as flour is weighed on a scale.

“Anything you care about in your life, me, anybody, you have to know if you’re succeeding or not. You have to measure,” he said. “If you’re on a diet, you have to put yourself on the scale regularly. If you’re trying to make money in the stock market, you’ve got to look at what your gains and losses are.”

His three-legged stool carried the day in Austin and Washington from the days when Bush was Texas governor through the administration of current U.S. education secretary Arne Duncan.

Kress was so secure about the importance and validity of testing that in 2002, he signed on as a lobbyist for Pearson, the giant company that creates the Texas exams. Pearson’s most recent five-year state contract was worth $462 million, and it makes millions more supplying test-prep material to school districts.

Through 2011, Kress was a respected public voice for education reform among the leadership of the Legislature and executive branch.

But among the growing band of testing critics, Kress’ professional alliance with Pearson tarred him as the agent of an evil empire. Suddenly a man once hailed as a hero of school accountability was considered testing’s Darth Vader — without him having changed his position.

And by late 2011, even the truest of believers could feel the wind change. Kress all but stopped speaking in public and refused most interview requests.

Superintendent Dr. Jeff Turner of Coppell ISD helped form the North Texas Regional Consortium, which supported Robert Scott's position and pushed back at testing. (Michael Ainsworth, The Dallas Morning News)

Independence declared

Bill Hammond was another of the remaining true believers in the power of the three-legged stool. Head of the Texas Association of Businesses, Hammond represented a constituency that many Texas politicians attend closely.

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Bill Hammond

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Head of Texas Association of Business and one of the most public and consistent supporters of high-stakes testing.

The former state legislator had focused on education issues since the mid-1980s.

So when Hammond heard about Scott’s comments to the state board and at the Midwinter Conference, he put a full-page ad in the Austin American-Statesman. The text didn’t mention Scott, but the dog whistle was earsplitting to those attuned to the politics:

“The new testing standards begin this spring, but opponents of a quality public education system are aggressively pressing to roll back reforms, delay tests and render the results meaningless. Why? They’re concerned that the results will show a Texas public school system that’s underperforming and failing our students.”

Among those who recognized that as a whistle was Coppell’s superintendent Turner.

Turner’s fight against the state exams started in 2006, when, he says, he had an epiphany about his own focus on test scores.

“I’ve been working since I got into education in the ’70s and superintendency in the early ’90s knowing that the system’s not effective,” he said. “I knew it was bad; it was wrong. I’d been co-opted into work, work, work on those tests.”

By 2006, complaints about the burden of testing were widespread among Texas school superintendents.

So that year, Turner and 34 other Texas superintendents formed the Visioning Institute, an effort to present an alternative approach.

The report, issued in 2008, countered Kress’s three-legged stool with its own description of an accountability system “based on compliance, coercion, and fear.”

In September 2011, not long after the TAMSA co-founder’s fateful back-to-school night, Turner banded together with eight nearby superintendents to create the North Texas Regional Consortium. The day Hammond’s ad slapped down Scott, they wrote a letter in support of Scott that pushed back at testing.

That letter became the framework for a resolution distributed by the Texas Association of School Administrators that was passed by more than 85 percent of Texas school boards.

Turner, then TASA president, barnstormed the state and encouraged other superintendents to create more local consortiums. Intense in front of crowds, he invokes, without irony, the Declaration of Independence in calling for educators to work to toss off the yoke of testing.

One admirer called him “our Patrick Henry.”

For legislators wondering which way the political winds would blow in 2013, Turner’s success was a clear message that testing opposition was broad. Eventually, Turner and TASA would hand off the grass-roots work to TAMSA.

The school administrators had even higher goals than test reduction. They wanted to crack the entire system of accountability that rested on the test scores.

Part 1: A grass-roots group of parents play indispensable role in the battle that undid testing in Texas. Read

Part 3: As pressure builds, the end game is clear even before the legislative session starts. Read

Testing Timeline

Testing timeline

The first state-mandated standardized test, the Texas Assessment of Basic Skills (TABS), was created in 1979. For the next 28 years, the legislature periodically increased the number and stakes of the tests: